Tag Archives: Pen Ward

Popping up online today you can expect multiple websites to be previewing their own sets of exclusive artwork from the new art book Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo. The book publishes in one week on the 14th. Here is a link to the book on Amazon.

Many Meathaus associates have connections to the show. Tom Herpich is one of the early designers and then storyboard artists who helped to shape the show. Jesse Moynihan has been a storyboard artist on the show for most of the seasons so far. Brandon Graham has contributed boards to the latest season. Pen Ward, Phil Rynda and Rebecca Sugar have all been featured in our Go For the Gold! sketchbook anthologies. I wrote and designed this book.

Let’s take our own exclusive look at just some of the piles of concept artwork featured in the book by Tom Herpich.

At the top of this post you’ll see some fashion concepts for Marceline, and everywhere else a slew of wild visual designs for Mannish Man the Minotaur from the season one episode “The Enchiridion!”

The book is full of exciting work like this, often paired with insights from the artists themselves, such as this quote from Tom regarding Mannish Man:

“I think this might be my very first character design—maybe from my first day working on the show. Definitely within the first couple weeks. I didn’t really have much of an idea of what the job really was yet, plus there were some hiccups in the production, so we had a lot of extra time on these first couple episodes. So I think this stuff came from Phil just telling me to go nuts and have fun. I didn’t realize at the time that all this stuff was impossibly complicated, plus strayed so far from the original storyboard drawings that it would’ve all had to be reboarded to use these designs. I think even the final one, after all the far-out stuff had been shot down, ended up being too complex and too far off-board, and needed a lot of retakes in the animation later on. If I got the assignment now, he’d end up looking a lot closer to how he does in the board, for better or worse. This was the problem, this superfluous inventive energy, that eventually got solved by my doing tons of concept drawings for episodes in the works.”

Here is the jacket cover of the art book that I wrote and designed, Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo. It has an introduction by Guillermo del Toro. It was edited by Eric Klopfer at Abrams, which is the publisher. Cartoon Network, Pen Ward, Adam Muto, and the whole crew were involved in its creation. Here is an amazon.com referral link: Adventure Time: The Art of Ooo that you can click and pre-order it with so that I can earn some extra change and go out for some pizzas. It is still on a super pre-order sale as of right now. The very reasonable $35 cover price (this is a 352 page book), is currently 29% off … so that’s about ten bucks off, which makes it $24.92. Get into it! It publishes this fall. Look out for more previews and images soon.